A round-up of supermarket news and gossip
The Co-op has said that it generated a record £214m on Christmas Eve helping to drive its like-for-like sales up by 3.3% over the 13 weeks to January 5th.

Marks and Spencer is to launch a new range aimed at the “foodie” consumer, which offers a wider range of basic ingredients including herbs. As part of the drive the retailer will stock fewer ready meals.

Sainsbury laid bare the growing dominance of Britain’s supermarkets by dismissing the doom and gloom surrounding the high street and saying that it expected to “thrive” in the current slowdown. Justin King added “We are well equipped to thrive in the tough times we are facing. Our non food business is growing very strongly.” Andrew Kasoulis, analyst at Credit Suisse, said the trading update was “robust”, but maintained an under-perform rating on the stock. He added “We think recovery continues faster elsewhere, for example Morrisons.”

The Naked Chef, alias Jamie Oliver, may fly into another naked rage at his paymaster, Sainsbury, when he learns that sales of eggs from caged hens were up nearly 16% in the stores. TNS indicated that Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Asda are all witnessing a boom in caged egg sales as customers turn away from more expensive free range varieties.

John Lewis is to relocate its Liverpool store to a four-floor site in the Paradise street development.

Wal-Mart has appointed Jack Sinclair, the former group marketing and trading director of Safeway in the UK, as its new vice-president of grocery merchandise.

Tesco plans to invest about £380m on tripling the size of its business in Turkey to more than 150 stores over the next five years. Britains biggest retailer recently said it wanted to increase its number of hypermarkets in Turkey and to break into Istanbul. It now has 46 stores in clusters around cities such as Izmir. The business which trades as Kipa, generated £500m of revenue in 2007. Tesco runs stores in 13 countries outside the UK, including Poland, Korea and China.

Morrison, the Bradford-based supermarket chain, said it had conquered the South of England at last after reporting its strongest sales growth for four years and lifting profit targets. Marc Bolland the chief executive said that the group’s biggest advertising campaign helped pick up four million extra customers across its 375 stores in the run-up to Christmas.

Love them or loathe them, the giant supermarket chains are now part of our lives, and in many communities they are the biggest single provider of employment. What is more, they have a tradition of being flexible employers, accommodating the needs of students, parents and older people. In the case of Tesco, the company has a long tradition of being involved in regeneration schemes such as Oldham and Glasgow. Most people would be able to locate free-range eggs at the supermarket, but the meat aisle is a minefield for those seeking sausages and rashers from pigs that were once as happy as, well, pigs in muck.

More than 98% of imported pork, bacon or ham is intensively produced. Now the RSPCA has written to DEFRA and the Food Standards Agency and leading supermarkets demanding change, claiming that consumers are in the danger of being misled.

Asda is planning its biggest internet expansion in an attempt to generate £1bn of online sales by 2011 and is an attempt to close the gap with Tesco. The group plans to go ahead with the likes of Argos and John Lewis by putting more than 750,000 non-food products on the web from the summer under the Asda Direct service.

Sources close to the £2.5bn sale of Somerfield insisted that the process had not been set in chain by Robert Tchenguiz, as speculation continued to mount about a potential loss faced by the Iranian billionaire.

GEMINI